Traditionally, network events have been reported for making data associated with events occurring on a network available to users. As modern computing environments make more, and more interesting, data available to users, increasingly sophisticated tools have appeared to help people understand this data. Unfortunately, the reporting tools made available to date exhibit various deficiencies. For example, they are too general, and with such generality comes great flexibility but even greater user confusion. In addition they are too specialized, and in their excellence to satisfy the needs of users whose data sets have predictable qualities they obscure relationships which are themselves interesting data sets. To this end, conventional reporting tools have ineffectively represented the data.
Moreover, with respect to network events, the deficiencies noted above prevent all but the most basic and critical of alerts from rising out of the noise. For example, the reporting of such network events has been performed outside of the context of the policy by which raw data is filtered to create the network events, therefore dividing policy controls and object definitions from network events, resulting in a major impediment to network monitoring. There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.